Backstreets/origin story

One Soft Infested Summer

One soft infested summer. Springsteen said it, and I went right back there.

My grandparents’ house was quiet at night, too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world still awake. I’d sneak into the front room, lift the lid on the old record player — real wood, heavy as sin, probably built before the war — and set Born to Run on the turntable like it was contraband.

I kept the volume just high enough to feel it.Low enough that Mamaw wouldn’t come down the hall.That was my church.

I didn’t know what half the lyrics meant, but I knew how they made me feel. Like I wasn’t crazy for wanting more. Like someone out there saw the same cracks I saw — in people, in town, in the way adults talked about fairness with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

I didn’t call it politics.It was just a feeling.A flicker of recognition in a dark house, in a soft Southern night, with a borrowed voice telling me I wasn’t alone.

That’s where it started.Not in some big moment.Just a kid with a record, listening hard.

Trying to understand the world before the world got its hands on him.

Sounded like this: